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• 190 • 6 RebellionbythePound H E A R T H AT whenever someone in the White House tells a lie, Nixon gets a royalty.” By the fall of 1973 Johnny Carson’s jabs at the president of the United States were becoming more constant and merciless as the deepening Watergate investigation pointed decidedly toward Richard Nixon’s personal criminal involvement. In one monologue that autumn Carson remarked, “Did you know that Richard Nixon is the only president whose formal portrait was painted by a police sketch artist?” His audience— numbering five hundred in NBC’s Burbank, California, studio, 12 million in front of television sets nationwide, and legions of network executives and sponsors—savored every punch line. Then, during the rancorous summer of 1974, when Nixon’s disgrace seemed all but sealed, Carson turned abruptly to his longtime sidekick Ed McMahon before a broadcast and declared: “I’ve got to let up on Nixon, now. He’s going down the tubes and I feel sorry for him.” Carson’s jabs at Nixon stopped. Others joked on—the market for presidential ridicule having been established and a steady supply being required to meet demand—but Carson, after rendering judgment and dispensing his measure of punishment, was the first to decree compassion. Few questioned the undisputed king of late-night television—either his decision to attack the president with comedy or the wisdom of his merciful withdrawal. Carson the comedian reigned supreme; his authority seemed absolute.1 The power of the presidency, by contrast, was laid low. When Gerald R. Ford took the oath of office following Nixon’s resignation on August 9, 1974, he became president without ever having earned a single vote from the national electorate. A popular and well-respected congressman elected thirteen times to the House of Representatives by the people of Grand Rapids, Michigan, Ford served eight years as House minority leader before being nominated by Nixon in 1973 to be vice president after Spiro Agnew “I r e b e l l i o n b y t h e p o u n d • 191 • ignominiously resigned amid his own corruption scandal. When he entered the White House a year later, Ford inherited a host of national crises that included impending defeat in Vietnam, the decline of the country’s manufacturing economy, runaway inflation measuring 12 percent annually, and an assessment of the chief executive by an American public so cynical about the president’s ability to lead or inspire that its inclination was to laugh first and listen later, if at all. Awash in low expectations, Americans recalled Ford’s words from the previous year, after he was sworn in as vice president. He pleasantly surprised many in a country that knew nothing about him with a self-effacing pun drawn from the automotive heritage of his native Michigan: “I am a Ford,” he humbly admitted, “not a Lincoln.” Americans could only nod in resignation.2 The gap seemed irreconcilable between the power of performers such as Johnny Carson to control the dance of the comedians and the president’s utter relegation to being always and only the butt of the joke. Although Ronald Reagan is understandably credited with once again empowering the office with joviality beginning in 1981—even as he has garnered both credit and scorn for restoring the imperial presidency—the significance of Ford and his administration’s effect on the nation’s humor is usually minimized or overlooked entirely. Although he was the victim of continual jokes and scathing parody impugning his legitimacy as president, his judgment, his intellect, and even his physical coordination, he was also an unlikely mediator and modest comedian who was surprisingly effective at rehabilitating people’s attitudes toward the presidency while simultaneously redefining the president’s calculated use of laughter to advance policy and reestablish a sense of national community and credibility. During his thirty months in office Ford projected an unassuming simplicity consistent with another comment he made during the same speech in which he accepted the vice presidency: “I am proud—very proud—to be one of the two hundred million Americans.” By defining himself first and foremost as a fellow citizen, he began the process of recalibrating the equilibrium between the people and their highest elected official, a balance that had been thrown far out of kilter during the previous decade. To the extent that Americans could once again imagine someone sufficiently like their best selves in the White House, capable of tempering...

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